Anteater

The "real" socialism that conservatives love to demonize is great. The problem is that people will inevitably gravitate towards hierarchies after a generation or two when decision-making power gets consolidated at some level, leading to wealth consolidation as well. Plus people like their mass-produced trinkets and the instant gratification of walking into a restaurant or coffee place and having another human serve them. That's why we can't have nice things like a revolution.

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jadis

What is it then? What's the system of governance? What model of political power does it operate on?

Anteater

Basically this - Wikipedia - Revolutionary Catalonia

I've also see a lot of advocacy for more communities like Marinaleda, but since they still allow private enterprise it wouldn't sit well with the anarchist types. The Guardian - Spain's communist model village

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The Batlord

It's a business owned by the employees. It can still have a hierarchy as managers and paygrades can be voted on. It doesn't really require socialism. It's just that capitalism tends toward strict hierarchies and ownership by one or a limited amount of people.

You sound angry. Are you okay? If you know what Marxism and anarcho syndicalism are then I'm sure you know that Nancy Pelosi does not qualify. So exactly what axe are you grinding?

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jadis

No, not at all, I wrote that bit cause I thought it was amusing in a "funny cause it's true" kinda way...

But beyond the obvious absurdity of most of the usages I cited, I don't think talk of "true" socialism or the "true meaning" of the word socialism will get you anywhere. There are too many different models, many of them at loggerheads with one another, an enormous number of specific factors involved in each case etc and so forth.

On some accounts it's synonymous with Marxism, on others with one of the countless strands of anarchism, on others still with post-WWII Keynesianism etc. How does one pick which one is the privileged version?

Guybrush

Some parts of society are better when regulated in a more socialist manner, like when greed might possibly interfere with the service, like health services, education or policing.

Some parts of society are better off by regulated capitalism as it creates innovation, motivation, and a potential bettering through competition and natural selection. Services or products like restaurants, construction companies or the manufacturing of cars.

Somewhere between the two, there's a winning combination.

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The Batlord

And burn ever restaurant that isn't a roach infested hole-in-the-wall.

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jadis

The view I represent, at least for the sake of this conversation, is as follows: the Marxian critique of capitalist exploitation and, more broadly, of capitalism is for the most part hard to argue with.

The problem with Marxism is the lack of theory of political power, or a theory of governance. What happens after the bourgeois rule of the factory owners and their elected representatives is overturned is that the power structure defaults to being centralized in the hands of the very, very few, and the bit where they spread it around later never arrives. What you get is a society defined not by competition, neither by collaboration, but by coercion, a coercion that, if nothing else, is at least much more blatant and visible than the economic coercion by the so-called invisible hand of capital.

This is why I'm talking about power structures rather than economic systems. If an able Marxist can dismantle this argument, great. I'm all for minimizing misery and not so sure about the bit where immutable human essence dictates that we all desire Mcnuggets in the suburbs.

The Batlord

I'm no expert on Marxism but my impression is that what you're describing as Marxism is specifically Marxist-Leninism. The vanguard party and such. I'm really not down with that which is why I relate more to anarchism but I'm pretty agnostic on methods of change and the form society will take as we're essentially trying to predict how capitalism will shake out and nobody really knows how that will happen. My firm beliefs are anti-capitalism and anti-hierarchy but other than that I'm mostly coping with reality with guillotine jokes.

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jadis

On the one hand, yes, clearly: the authors I'm most familiar with on this topic wrote with the USSR in mind. But those same authors (Raymond Aron, François Furet, Pierre Rosanvallon) would probably make the following argument: the governance-shaped lacuna, the absence of theory of political power, is there in Marx whether you push for an armed revolution with all the fanaticism of a Lenin or go the other route (let's pretend I know what that is).

Another, not unrelated, critique of Marx is that he thought in teleological terms. In other words, he pretended to have discovered the universal mechanism of history and saw every event as a step in the march toward the inevitable horizon. Those who make this critique are likely to describe history as determined by multiple factors, random, unpredictable, contradictory, opaque, given to multiple interpretations and so forth, rather than defined by the "monotone" theme of class struggle.

This view has its merits in my opinion. Whether those involved in political struggles today can dispense with capitalism's greatest critic is another question, and one I'm spectacularly unqualified to even begin to ponder.